Many smoking devices have been proposed through the years as improvements upon, or alternatives to, smoking products that require combusting tobacco for use. Many of those devices purportedly have been designed to provide the sensations associated with cigarette, cigar or pipe smoking, but without delivering considerable quantities of incomplete combustion and pyrolysis products that result from the burning of tobacco. To this end, there have been proposed numerous smoking products, flavor generators and medicinal inhalers that utilize electrical energy to vaporize or heat a volatile material, or attempt to provide the sensations of cigarette, cigar or pipe smoking without burning tobacco to a significant degree. See, for example, the various alternative smoking articles, aerosol delivery devices and heat generating sources set forth in the background art described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,726,320 to Robinson et al., U.S. Pat. App. Pub. No. 2013/0255702 to Griffith Jr. et al., and U.S. Pat. App. Pub. No. 2014/0096781 to Sears et al., all of which are incorporated herein by reference in their entireties. See also, for example, the various types of smoking articles, aerosol delivery devices and electrically-powered heat generating sources referenced by brand name and commercial source in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/170,838 to Bless et al., filed Feb. 3, 2014, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
It would be desirable to provide a smoking article that employs heat produced by electrical energy to provide the sensations of cigarette, cigar, or pipe smoking, that does so without combusting or pyrolyzing tobacco to any significant degree, that does so without the need of a combustion heat source, and that does so without necessarily delivering considerable quantities of incomplete combustion and pyrolysis products. Further, advances with respect to manufacturing electronic smoking articles would be desirable.